Blind Spot

Starting this weekend at the Tiff Bell Lightbox is the new retrospective on the films of Hollywood icon Bette Davis entitled The Hard Way: The Films of Bette Davis. The retrospective covers the entire gamut of Davis’ career and runs until Sunday December 8th.

This weekend featured some of the earlier films from the Davis cannon with Of Human Bondage, The Letter and the scathing behind the scenes Broadway drama that earned Davis Best Actress honors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, All About Eve. All About Eve is one of the career defining roles for Bette Davis, she carries the role of Margo Channing of with ease and responds to the manipulations and Anne Baxter’s conniving Eve Harrington aplomb. (more…)

ITALIAN HORROR WEEK – DEEP RED – Ruminations on the Argento Classic from One of the Formerly Uninitiated.

Having grown up in the suburb of Mississauga, On Canada, a place that was great to grow up in but devoid of any of the cool, niche video stores that populate the so close yet so far metropolis that is Toronto, my introduction to anything other than the mainstream horror was stunted. Being the late 80’s early 90’s when I started to really pursue my education in earnest, one summer I systematically went through the entire horror section at the local Jumbo video and rented every tape they had, the internet was a funny place that you could download and watch a movie trailer in the blistering time of 45 minutes to an hour. Without the availability of something as amazing as the modern internet, with IMDB and the millions of torrent sites, back in the late 80’s/early 90’s tracking down rare films required actual homework. And with my local video store favoring films like “April Fool’s Day” and “Sleepaway Camp” to fill their shelves, the likes of Bava, Fulci, and Argento never seemed to show up.

Of course I have tracked down a lot of these films in the decades since, but “Deep Red” remained one of the few that have eluded my grasp, until now. Recently I had been given a copy of the Blue Underground ‘Uncensored English Version’, basically all the original gore restored but the romantic storyline has still been excised. And after being asked by Mr Terror himself to contribute an article to this year’s Italian Horror Week rundown, I felt this was as good a time as any to dig into the DVD and see what the film is all about. Starring David Hemmings and frequent Argento collaborator, and mother of daughter Asia Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Deep Red is considered by many to be Argento’s masterpiece for good reason. The performances are solid and the story sufficiently creepy and tension packed that it sucks you in almost immediately and keeps you invested until the blood soaked ending. (more…)

During the calendar year of 2012 a variety of film bloggers and writers across the city of Toronto, including those at The Matinee, Toronto Screenshots and Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind, have been taking part in a yearlong series called “The Blind Spot Series”, where we as critics make a list of films that in one circle or another are deemed to be classics that we yet to see, and review them from the perspective of the first time viewer. Well here at Entertainment Maven we felt like it was time to join in on the fun. For this month’s viewing I, the Movie Junkie, will be taking a look at the 1978 Academy Award…